Searching for the Fleet Read online

  Searching for the Fleet

  A Diving Novel

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Contents

  I. Dix

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  II. The Search

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  III. Lieutenant Tightass

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  IV. The Search

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  V. Advanced Anacapa Theory

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  VI. The Search

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  The Application of Hope sample chapter

  Newsletter sign-up

  Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  About the Author

  For Dean, who keeps asking questions….

  Part One

  Dix

  Five Years Ago

  One

  For the rest of her life, Yash Zarlengo would replay that last night in her mind, going over each and every detail, looking for something different—a clue, perhaps, a missed signal.

  She never found one that satisfied her.

  Yash and Jonathan “Coop” Cooper had been sitting in their favorite bar in the Ivoire. The bar was really just an extension of the main commissary, but the ship’s designers had gone all out. The bar had twenty-five tables organized in small groups, some with counter running behind them, and plants shielding the patrons. The tables were made of brass and some teak-colored wood. The chairs matched the tables, except for the comfortable brass-colored cushions.

  Alcohol bottles lined the two interior walls. The wall that was easiest to reach had once held the alcohol which had been easiest to find in what had been the sector the Ivoire traveled through. The wall behind the recycler cleaning unit had upper cabinets filled with bottles that were mostly one-of-a-kind.

  Technically, everything in this bar was now one-of-a-kind.

  Yash tried not to think about that. Instead, she stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows that revealed the vastness of space—or whatever planet the Ivoire orbited. The windows could be shuttered, then shielded, and often were when the ship was traveling from place to place.

  But at that moment, the Ivoire was docked at the space station that housed the Lost Souls Corporation. A woman who called herself Boss in that bastardization of Standard everyone spoke in this time period had started the corporation to discover more about something she called “stealth tech,” but which really had more to do with the Fleet’s anacapa drives.

  Boss had found the Ivoire. In fact, Boss had accidentally rescued the Ivoire. She and her people had inadvertently activated the equipment in a decaying sector base. That equipment had pulled the Ivoire out of a trap in foldspace, bringing the Ivoire and her crew five thousand years into their future.

  As a cadet—hell, throughout her career—Yash thought she could deal with anything. But the loss of everything she knew—from the Fleet itself to the language her people spoke to the history that was just yesterday to her and so far in the past as to be unknown to these people—was overwhelming. Some days, she thought she wouldn’t make it.

  But going through this with the crew of the Ivoire, all five hundred of them, made it easier. She wasn’t going through this alone.

  She took comfort in that.

  Hence the drinking sessions with Coop. They would meet in the bar not quite nightly, put their feet on the tables precisely because that wasn’t regulation, and drink some of the old whiskey, the kind that they had brought from planets they would never see again, in a time period they couldn’t return to.

  After the first few sessions, Coop and Yash usually didn’t get drunk. They sipped and stared at the edges of the space station and the edges of the sector beyond. Planets Yash still didn’t recognize, nebulae that gleamed against the blackish-blueness, the red star so far in the distance that it looked like a pinprick of blood.

  She wasn’t coming to love those things, but they were becoming familiar. Anything could become familiar, given enough time.

  That night, about a year after they had arrived in this strange future, Coop was staring at his whiskey, not drinking it at all. He was looking through the glass at the view, in an unusually contemplative mood.

  He had been everyone’s rock. A solid, broad-shouldered man who seemed even taller and more broad-shouldered since they had arrived, he now had a few more lines on his face, a hint of silver in his black hair. He had stopped wearing any kind of uniform a few months ago, and had said nothing about it.

  He now dressed like Boss’s people, wearing black pants and a black or gray T-shirt, quietly moving his association from a Fleet that probably no longer existed to Lost Souls Corporation and its vague connection to something called the Nine Planets Alliance.

  He was shedding as much of the past as he could, and making it okay for the rest of the crew to do so. Some were already thinking of leaving the Ivoire permanently, taking jobs inside Lost Souls or becoming planet-bound somewhere in the Nine Planets.

  Yash couldn’t contemplate any of that. She still wore her Fleet clothes as well, although some of them were getting worn. She would have to replace her regulation boots soon, and she didn’t want to. They were comfortable.

  They were also coming apart.

  “Hey, can anyone join this little party?” Dix Pompiono, the Ivoire’s nominal first officer, spoke from behind them.

  Yash tensed. Coop stopped swirling the liquid in his glass. His expression hadn’t changed, a sign that Coop didn’t want anyone to know what he was feeling.

  But Yash knew exactly how Coop felt. Neither she nor Coop wanted to deal with Dix right now. This was their relaxation place, not a place for histrionics. And Dix had been all over the emotional map ever since the Ivoire arrived here.

  Dix had actually suffered some kind of breakdown a few months ago after a mission Coop ran to Starbase Kappa to shut down a long-malfunctioning anacapa drive. The mission had nearly failed because of Dix. Coop resented that deeply.

  Yash hadn’t told Coop that she had found the mission joyous, in its own way. Yash had felt useful again, like she was back in the old Fleet, with a proper goal and a future.

  Of course, after that mission, the Ivoire’s crew had nothing to do. And, in some ways, that mission had been the Ivoire crew’s last gasp. The mission had brought up too many conflicting feelings for everyone, not even counting what had happened with Dix.

  “Gotta pour your own.” Coop sounded welcoming, but the pause before he spoke probably told Dix more than enough.

  Behind her, glasses clinked. Then she saw movement reflected in the windows before her. Dix had taken a tumbler out of the cabinet near the recycler. He had grabbed the whiskey bottle and was now pouring himself a drink.

  Coop let out a sigh so small Yash wouldn’t have heard it
if she hadn’t been sitting next to him. Yash patted his arm, not to comfort, but in agreement.

  Coop glanced at her, blue eyes hooded. Then he shrugged ever so slightly with the shoulder closest to her, as if to say, What can you do?

  She mimicked his shrug so that he understood that she identified with him. The nice quiet evening they’d been enjoying would be quiet no longer.

  Dix rounded the table nearest them, carrying a tumbler of whiskey two fingers full. He stopped, looked at the view, then took a sip.

  He was gaunt now. He had always been too thin, and abnormally tall for someone who ended up as bridge crew. His hair had gone completely white in the past year, and his cheeks were sunken inward.

  The last time Yash had seen him, his hands shook as if he couldn’t control them.

  But they weren’t shaking now.

  “There’s the future,” he said, looking at the sector they still hadn’t explored. “It’s been there all along, hasn’t it?”

  He sounded like the old Dix, a little wry, intelligent, and maybe even a bit hopeful.

  Yash couldn’t believe that Dix was hopeful. He’d been the most distraught of all of the senior crew members, the one who had been least able to contain his heartbreak when he learned they could never, ever go back.

  Indeed, his completely insane meltdown on Starbase Kappa had come from some cockamamie scheme he had developed to send the Ivoire back to its own time period—and Coop had thwarted him.

  Dix had barely spoken to Coop since.

  Dix sipped from his tumbler, tilted his head back—clearly savoring the whiskey—and then swallowed. He turned away from the windows, and set his glass on a nearby table. But he didn’t sit.

  Instead, he continued to stand, the light from the space station illuminating half his face, leaving the side closest to Yash in shadow.

  “I owe you guys an apology,” Dix said.

  His voice had strength, which she hadn’t expected. The last time he had used the word “apology” in her presence he had said, I suppose you expect an apology, and his tone had been as mean as the words.

  Now, Yash didn’t answer him, but she met his gaze. He still seemed sad, as if sadness had leached into his very soul. She wondered if someone who knew her well would think the same thing of her.

  Coop didn’t even move. It was as if Coop hadn’t heard anything.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Dix said, glancing at Coop, then looking back at Yash. “I’ve been acting as if this happened just to me. It didn’t. It happened to all of us.”

  Yash didn’t wanted to react to anything Dix said, but she couldn’t help herself. She nodded.

  He gave her a faint smile, took that nod as an invitation, and sat down to the left of Coop. Coop rested his glass of whiskey on his flat stomach, and continued to stare at the universe beyond.

  “I can make excuses,” Dix said, “and I did. I know I did. The loss of Lenore made me crazy.”

  Everything made you crazy, Yash thought but didn’t say. She didn’t dare speak out at all, because everyone had lost family and loved ones, even her. She would never see her parents again, or her twin sisters. She hadn’t had a lover at the time the Ivoire left on its last mission for the Fleet, but she had had an entire cadre of friends, all of whom had not served on the Ivoire.

  She would never see them again. She would never see anyone she loved who hadn’t been on the Ivoire again.

  “Sometimes I think if we could access records of the Fleet, learn about what happened to everyone, I’d feel better,” Dix said.

  Yash stiffened. She’d had that thought. So had Coop. They’d actually looked through the information they’d pulled from Starbase Kappa, but it was minimal. Maintenance records mostly. No history of Fleet personnel, not even personnel who had come later.

  As was proper. No information about the Fleet should have been available in any closed Fleet outpost. None.

  “But I keep turning it over and over in my mind,” Dix said, “and I realize that discovering that Lenore married someone else and had kids with him—or didn’t marry anyone and died alone—that wouldn’t help me. It’s not just the loss of the people, selfish as that is to say. It’s the loss of the future. The expected, imagined future.”

  Coop let out a small sigh. His fingers wrapped around the glass, but he didn’t take another drink.

  “How do you do it?” Dix asked. “How do you get through each day? How do you accept that you should put your uniform away and say goodbye to the Fleet, when the Fleet has been our entire life?”

  Coop stiffened. Yash did too. Yash hadn’t ever had that conversation with Coop, although she’d had others. About the Fleet. About where it might be now, five thousand years later. About whether or not it still existed.

  About whether approaching it if it did exist was a good idea.

  “You don’t want to talk about it, do you?” Dix asked. “That’s how you’re coping. You’re denying what’s in front of you.”

  A surge of anger ran through Yash. Coop wasn’t denying anything. Neither was she. They were moving forward each and every day, just like they’d been trained to do.

  She swung her feet off the table, sitting up, about to speak, when Coop lifted one hand from his glass, forefinger out, stopping her.

  “I’m using my training,” he said to Dix. “You should too.”

  “Training?” Dix made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “None of us were trained for this.”

  Coop’s lips thinned. He sat up, then put his glass on the table in front of him.

  Yash tensed. She would step between them if need be. The crew was still on edge; they didn’t need to hear that their captain had physically fought with Dix.

  Then she swallowed, thinking about her own reaction.

  Coop wasn’t a violent man. He had never hit anyone on his crew, rarely hit someone who had attacked him. He was the calmest person she knew.

  That hint of violence in the air? Was she imagining it? Or had it come from her?

  She shifted slightly, saw Coop’s posture. No. She knew him well. He was furious. He was past furious. He was barely holding himself together.

  “We are all trained for this, First Officer Pompiono,” Coop said, enunciating each word precisely. He was using the captain speak he used only with the most recalcitrant crew members, the ones he would dump at the next port after dozens of write-ups. The hopeless ones.

  Dix raised his eyebrows. “I never heard any of my instructors mention that foldspace could catapult us five thousand years in the future, making us lose everything, cheating us of our own march through time. Making us abandon our families—”

  “Then you weren’t paying attention.” Coop handed his glass to Yash, as if she were his second in command, not Dix. And in truth, she had become Coop’s second in command. She had been at his side for the entire year they’d been stuck here, working on the Ivoire, figuring out the way forward. Dix had been wallowing in his own losses and breakdown, and Yash had been working. Hard. Like most of the crew.

  Yash set Coop’s glass next to hers, out of the way.

  Dix leaned back just a little, but there was something in his eyes. A kind of triumph, maybe? Relief that he had finally gotten an obvious emotional reaction out of Coop?

  Coop laid his hands flat on the table’s faux wood surface as if he were stretching them, as if he were pushing the table down so that he wouldn’t do anything harmful to anyone.

  “Our training,” Coop said, “was about this, and only this.”

  Dix frowned, opening his mouth to speak, probably to disagree, when Coop continued.

  “We were told that DV-Class ships ventured out alone. We could get lost. We might never come back. We often had no one to rely on but ourselves. I don’t know about you, but my training included years of role-playing those very things, plus going over historical incidents of lost ships, coping with hundreds and hundreds of scenarios in which this very thing occurred.”

  “It�
��s not the same,” Dix said.

  “It’s exactly the same.” Coop spoke softly, but used as much energy as if he had shouted them.

  Yash was holding her breath. She made herself release it.

  “It’s not the same,” Dix repeated. “In those scenarios, we would have had hope.”

  “Hope?” Coop spoke the word as if Dix had been using Boss’s bastardized Standard. “What kind of hope are you talking about?”

  “Hope that we could return.” Dix was calm, like the Dix of old. The man that Coop had made First Officer.

  Yash could remember when Dix inspired confidence in everyone, when he knew the exact right words to say. When he really was an extension of Coop, understanding exactly how Coop would approach something, and then anticipating it, so Coop never even had to give the order.

  “You lack that hope now?” Yash asked. Because she didn’t. She was still searching for a way back, even though she knew it was a long shot. They had gotten here, hadn’t they? That meant returning was possible as well.

  Coop turned his head slightly, as if he had just remembered that Yash was in the conversation.

  Then he shifted his body, almost blocking her view of Dix.

  “You think all of those scenarios,” Coop said, “the hundreds and hundreds of them that we learned, would always have hope?”